Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953

Young British historian Timothy Johnston focuses on popular opinion,
particularly opinion about foreigners and international affairs. His
main sources are the reports on ‘popular mood’ regularly compiled by
security, police and regional Party officials, along with the official
Soviet press. Readers may become irritated by the appearance every few
pages of the term ‘bricolage’, signifying Soviet citizens’ sensible
habit of taking on board only the bits of official propaganda that
made sense to them and ignoring the rest. Still, that’s an improvement
on the assumption – common in some earlier scholarship – that
brainwashed Soviet citizens believed everything the regime told them.